Toronto Is Building a City Inside an Airport. The Jobs Are the Hard Part.

Toronto Is Building a City Inside an Airport. The Jobs Are the Hard Part.

The plan Council adopted for the former Downsview Airport requires roughly 12 million square feet of employment space alongside the housing. The anchor that was supposed to prove it — a film studio of more than a million square feet — was dropped, and the first employment block is now listed with a broker.

The runway is still there, for now. So are five hangar bays at 123 Garratt Boulevard — about 548,000 square feet of them[13], built to assemble aircraft, currently being marketed to tenants. On 23 March 2024 an unpainted Global 7500 lifted off[14], flew over central Toronto to Montréal, and took with it the last of the aircraft manufacturing that had run on this ground since 1929. The airfield closed behind it.

What replaces it is not a project. It is a secondary plan over roughly 540 hectares, anchored by two large landowners: Northcrest Developments, a subsidiary of the federal public-service pension manager PSP Investments, which holds the 370-acre airfield now branded YZD; and Canada Lands Company, the federal Crown corporation that runs Downsview Park and the districts around it. Over a thirty-year build-out the City estimates 115,000 new residents, 63,000 housing units and 52,000 workers[2] — in its own words, one of the largest city-building efforts in Toronto's history.

The number that decides whether any of that works is not the housing number. It is the employment floor the plan carries: a minimum of 1,114,000 square metres[1], about 12 million square feet. Housing has buyers. Jobs have to be recruited. The first recruit already walked.

What it was built to be

In April 1929, de Havilland Aircraft of Canada bought 28 hectares[16] — 70 acres — of farmland next to the rail line north of the city and built its own airfield on it. The choice was technical, not speculative: this is the high ground between the Don and Humber watersheds, which meant steady wind and very little fog. Pilots wanted flat, open, dry land, and Downsview was all three.

The war made it strategic. The plant turned out trainers and, more than 1,000 Mosquitos between 1941 and 1950. In 1947 the federal government assembled 270 surrounding properties into a single holding around the factory, and the result became RCAF Station Downsview, later CFB Toronto. In 1952 the Department of National Defence acquired de Havilland's own land and buildings outright. The complex at 123 Garratt Boulevard dates to the early 1950s as the company's second Downsview location; it grew in the 1960s for the Twin Otter[5] and again in the late 1970s and 1980s for the Dash 8. Bombardier took over de Havilland in 1992 and kept building there for three more decades.

"Aerospace dominated the site for 100 years." — Christopher Eby, Northcrest Developments

Ninety-five, strictly. But the point survives the arithmetic: for almost a century, one industry held the largest piece of undeveloped land inside Toronto, and nobody had to ask what it was for.

What broke

The military left first. CFB Toronto closed on 1 April 1996[16], and in 1998 Canada Lands Company incorporated a subsidiary to manage the base lands as a park. What followed was a long argument about what to keep. In March 2010 two maintenance hangars from 1942, buildings 55 and 58, were demolished over organised heritage objection — buildings that had carried heritage recognition and came down anyway. That outcome is worth holding onto, because the heritage conversation at Downsview is still running and the precedent on this ground is not reassuring.

The manufacturer left second, and for a reason it stated plainly. By 2018 Bombardier was using roughly ten per cent of a 370-acre site[15] while carrying the full cost of a 7,000-foot runway. In May of that year it agreed to sell the property to PSP Investments for US$635 million — about C$816 million — with a leaseback that set a clock on departure. Production moved to a new facility at Pearson, and the last aircraft left in March 2024. Northcrest was created to turn what remained into a city.

What the dirt remembers is the part the public record is thinnest on. A century of airframe assembly, fuelling, paint shops and military servicing is not a light environmental history, and the Secondary Plan was adopted alongside a Master Environmental Servicing Plan. But no record of site condition or contaminated-site filing for these lands could be located in open sources for this piece; Ontario's environmental records are largely request-based rather than published. The gap is declared here rather than filled.

The turn

In March 2021 Council adopted a site-specific policy setting the terms for rewriting the 2011 Downsview plan, and that autumn the City launched the Update Downsview study[4] while Northcrest and Canada Lands jointly filed an official plan amendment application (October 2021). The planning machinery, in other words, moved before the tenants did.

Then came the anchor. On 30 June 2021, PSP Investments and the Los Angeles studio owner Hackman Capital Partners announced a memorandum of understanding for a long-term ground lease[9] and a film and television campus of more than a million square feet, with Hackman investing roughly C$200 million. It was reported as a studio campus designed by BDP Quadrangle, with soundstages from 20,000 to 80,000 square feet. The pitch was not only film: Northcrest framed it as the door to a media, technology and innovation hub.

In September 2024 Northcrest dropped it[10], and submitted a plan seeking permissions for a broader range of employment uses instead.

"The market changed, and it changed pretty dramatically and pretty fast.[10]" — Christopher Eby, to RENX

The precedent that followed is real, and it is not speculative. In July 2025, Toronto City Council unanimously approved the Hangar District[11] — Northcrest with the global developer Hines as joint-venture partner — the first neighbourhood at YZD: just over 100 acres, roughly 5.3 million square feet of development, of which about 2.2 million is residential, for approximately 2,957 homes and a projected 7,400 jobs, with two blocks carrying 19- and 23-storey permissions, about nine acres of open space and a pedestrian bridge over the rail corridor into Downsview Park. On the Canada Lands side of the fence, Canada Lands' Downsview West district, which Council approved on 30 July 2026, will deliver about 9,250 homes with a minimum of 10 per cent affordable rental and a company target of 20 per cent; its Arbo district is also approved. Enabling works at the Hangar District finished in September 2026[13]. First residents are expected in 2031.

What the rules allow

Toronto does not run this site on a ratio. The plan sets no single ratio for the whole area. It sets a maximum gross density as a floor space index for each density area on Map 7-6, and separately requires minimum non-residential gross floor area, measured in square metres, in specific areas. That matters for reading the headline number correctly: the plan's 1,114,000 square metres of employment space is a floor on what must be provided as the districts build out, not a cap on what can be built. The housing figures work the other way; they are the expected yield of the permissions, not a quota.

At the block scale the arithmetic gets concrete. Within the Hangar District, the North Hangar lands at 123 Garratt Boulevard account for about 40 of the 101 acres and carry roughly 1.2 million square feet of permitted employment gross floor area including the 548,000 square feet of existing hangar bays. In September 2026 Northcrest put a 43-acre employment block there on the market through Cushman & Wakefield[12], targeting what Eby calls future-focused industries: defence, technology, advanced manufacturing, life sciences, post-secondary institutions, and film and digital media. Clean technology and robotics are frequently attached to Downsview in coverage of the project, but they do not appear in the developer's own stated list and are not confirmed here.

So the delta reads like this. What the ground holds is five hangar bays built for one tenant and a decommissioned runway. What the rules allow is a mid-rise city of tens of thousands of people wrapped around 12 million square feet of employment permissions — permissions that exist whether or not a single lease is signed.

Timeline

What it is now

The ground holds an empty airfield and five hangar bays; the rules allow a city of 115,000 people and 12 million square feet of jobs. The whole project lives in that gap, and the honest reading of it is not the usual one. This is not a case of a developer extracting value from a public asset — both owners are public. A federal pension manager owns one side of the fence and a federal Crown corporation owns the other, and Canada Lands' Downsview West district commits to at least 10 per cent affordable rental, with a corporate target of 20 per cent.

The real exposure is structural. The City's strongest instrument here is a floor on permitted employment floor area, and a floor binds the zoning, not the market. For a century the jobs on this land came from one company with a federal relationship and a war to supply. The next ones are being sought through a leasing brochure, from sectors — defence, life sciences, advanced manufacturing — that choose their locations on timelines no secondary plan controls. If they land, Toronto gets the innovation district the plan describes. If they do not, housing is still permitted, but only within the plan's phasing rule of 3 square metres of residential floor area for every 1 of non-residential built until each minimum is met, and the best-serviced vacant land in the city becomes a very large bedroom community with a subway station. That would not be a scandal. It would just not be what Council adopted.

What's still unknown

Three things would sharpen this story, and all three sit in records that are not published. The environmental history is the biggest: no record of site condition for the airport lands could be found in open sources, and Ontario's contaminated-site information is request-based — a direct request to the ministry, or the environmental reports filed with the district plans, would settle what a century of aircraft manufacturing left in the soil. One question has since been answered: the Secondary Plan came into force in August 2024 for everything except the lands south of Wilson Avenue, and the carve-out covered lands under appeal at the Ontario Land Tribunal (file OLT-24-000829); the Tribunal approved the balance of the plan, with added Wilson South policies, on 21 November 2025. Second, the title chain behind the 2018 transfer and any subsequent charges sit in Ontario's land registry, which charges per search. Third, the heritage question: the hangar complex at 123 Garratt Boulevard was brought onto the City's Heritage Register in 2025, but listing is a weaker instrument than designation under the Ontario Heritage Act, and on this exact site heritage recognition did not save the 1942 hangars in 2010. Which structures are protected, and to what standard, is the thing to watch as each district plan comes forward.